Bridger photography artist sets exhibit at Northcutt Steele Gallery

‘What Else Is There To Say About Land?’ opens Feb. 16 with artist’s reception

MSU BILLINGS NEWS SERVICES — Jean Albus, a Bridger artist who uses photography to immerse viewers into the folds of landscape and the rise and fall of fabric imagery, will be showing her art at the Northcutt Steele Gallery at Montana State University Billings starting Feb. 16.

The exhibit, “Jean Albus: What Else Is There To Say About Land?” will be up at the MSU Billings gallery on the main floor of the Liberal Arts Building from Feb. 16 to March 16, 2012. There will be a free artist’s reception on Thursday, Feb. 16 from 5-7 p.m.

Largely self-taught, Albus has been devoting herself to her photographic art for the past seven years. She currently lives near Bridger where she photographs dresses and the landscape around her as “surrogates for herself to express thoughts about time and mortality.”

She has created a body of work that shares feelings about her surroundings and connection to it. In her artist’s statement, she says “The landscape and sky, the activity of the elements and the creatures that abide here is the beauty that inspires me. When driving the back roads or walking through sage and grass, I think constantly about my own connection to the land. I am confronted every day with the harshness of living in the high desert. I didn’t know at first if I could ever come to love it or if it could ever replace my love for the mountains, but I have and it has.”

Albus also says “bringing the female figure into my photography expresses more in a physical sense my experience of contact with my surroundings and the things I love about it — the light, the wind, the dry heat, the cracked earth, blistering cold and even the dead things I come across. But for me it’s always about coming to terms with time, death, renewal, rebirth and love. I also just enjoy making interesting pictures for the sheer pleasure of the process and seeing what emerges from that part of the journey.”

The Northcutt Steele Gallery is located on the first floor of the Liberal Arts Building on the four-year campus of MSU Billings. Hourly fee parking is available in the parking lot, directly south of McMullen Hall near the flagpole entrance to the campus off of Poly Drive. To visit the university is an easy walk from downtown Billings and all points in between.

For more information on the exhibit, contact Jerome Mazyck, Northcutt Steele Gallery director, at 657-2903 or by e-mail at jmazyck@msubillings.edu.

PHOTO ABOVE: Jean Albus’ “What a Woman Wants” is an example of her work.